By Wayne Allensworth
The electoral triumph of the Trump-Vance ticket was heartening to many of us. Though your observer remains wary of some of Trump’s cabinet nominees, the president-elect has shown signs of having learned some hard lessons from his last tussle with the Swamp. It’s been amusing — and gratifying — to watch the globo-leftists melt down, but we should not lapse into triumphalism or complacency. As noted earlier, our fight is just beginning, with politics just one front in our battle.
Our adversaries may be clumsy, and they surely overestimated themselves during the presidential campaign, but their ideological predecessors took a long view of the twilight struggle, and our current opponents have adapted to changing conditions on the social-political battlefield before. Trump’s support base is largely made up of working- and middle-class people who do not make political activism a top priority in their lives. After Trump’s resounding victory, they will get back to their pre-election lives. Our opponents, however, never leave their ideological cocoons. We should be cognizant of our antagonists’ ability to reinvent themselves, regroup, and renew the battle. They will take big steps when possible but will settle for incrementally advancing toward their goals. An historical case in point was the development and promulgation of “Cultural Marxism.” Its transgressive spirit was not new, but the form that subversion of traditional values took in the last century has readily identifiable roots. The account below of its development is largely drawn from J. Michael Waller’s book Big Intel, which traced the transformation of the US intelligence apparatus into a “woke” blunt instrument wielded against Donald Trump during his first term.
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Moscow, 1922. Soviet secret police chief Feliks Dzerzhinsky chaired a meeting at the Marx-Engels Institute. “Iron Feliks” headed a group composed of European Communist leaders who were developing a subversive second front in the world revolution. They were formulating a strategy for the Communist International, the Comintern, to attack Western bourgeois society from within. Soviet Communist Party Politburo member Karl Radek and Hungarian revolutionary Georg Lukacs were present, as was Ruth Fischer, founder of the Austrian Communist Party, and Willi Munzenberg, a German Communist who had organized revolutionary front groups for the Comintern. Together they designed a strategy for criticizing and deconstructing every aspect of traditional society, its morals, norms, and structures. The plan to weaken bourgeois society from within differed in its particulars and methodology from doctrinaire Marxism, but drew on Marx’s own writings, which envisioned an all-out culture war. In an 1843 letter to philosopher and revolutionary Arnold Ruge, for example, Marx wrote of the necessity of undermining Western societies through “ruthless criticism of the existing order,” the defamation of Christianity, the rule of law, and bourgeois social norms.
Eventually, “critical theory” was associated with the Marxist Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. The Frankfurt School’s intellectual cadre included figures like Erich Fromm, T.W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, the gurus of what would become “political correctness,” and then the “woke” ideology that would spread across the Western world, including the United States. Marcuse played an especially important role in spreading Frankfurt School ideas here. The Marxist duality of oppressed proletariat and oppressor bourgeoisie splintered into “oppressed” identity groups vs. “the patriarchy” to exploit tensions between the sexes, as well as class, racial and ethnic frictions. The most important element of all was the subversion of traditional sexual morality, taking aim at the family as an exploitive patriarchal vehicle.
Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci developed the strategy of “a long march through the institutions.” His aim was to combine a critical attack on bourgeois values while embedding revolutionary ideas within key institutions in civil society and the bureaucracy. The New Left picked up the “long march” model in the 1960s, even as postmodernism, which asserted that all human interactions were merely power relationships, reinforced and renewed the ideas used earlier by the Comintern. Bourgeois society would be hollowed out from within, then kicked over like a fragile house of cards.
Many members of the New Left and pro-communist Vietnam war protestors of the 1960s remade themselves into bureaucrats, politicians who ran for office in bourgeois states, leaders in education and media at all levels, even into managers for globalist corporations. James Burnham’s “managerial system” was a perfect vehicle for the technocratic wing of what remained an essentially revolutionary zeitgeist. The Clintons and Barack Obama are prime examples. Neoconservatives from the George W. Bush administration, whose globalist aspirations melded nicely with the left’s utopianism, augmented their efforts. The merger of the globo-left managers who became neo-liberals allied with neoconservatives was ably described in David Priestland’s magisterial history of the Communist movement, The Red Flag. Thus, John Brennan, one-time political supporter of Communist Party USA chief Gus Hall, became Obama’s CIA chief. It was under Obama, as Waller wrote, that “woke” ideology was consolidated and institutionalized at the agency, even as it was embedded in the DC bureaucracy in general.
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During his interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance noted that wokeness is a religion, albeit a religion without forgiveness. There could be no mercy for its opponents. Its dogmas, as noted above, were drawn from Marx, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and postmodernism. Its radical enforcers are the anarchic wing of the managerial-leftist alliance. As in the past, they call themselves “anti-fascist,” but they are really the opponents of every social norm and moral principle that has undergirded stable societies. Their ideology and its managerial view of society — that all issues are merely problems to be dealt with by “experts” — is deeply entrenched in American institutions.
Trump’s victory has stunned and demoralized the systemic opponents of the MAGA movement, but they remain in place for now. A number of former military and intelligence officials ran for congressional seats in recent elections and ran for re-election in 2024. Some kept their seats. The Deep State has been taking out insurance against another Trump victory. They, and their allies in the bureaucracy, will regroup and defend what they see as their prerogatives, and will no doubt use whatever means they deem expedient to do so. Trump’s nominees for high level posts, which include Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, and John Ratcliffe to head the CIA, will undoubtedly attempt to clean house in the intelligence community. Kash Patel’s projected task is the same at the FBI. Globalism and woke ideology run deep in the Swamp, and the bureaucracy knows the stakes full well.
And we must not forget that more than 70 million voters cast ballots for Kamala Harris. Some might reassess their positions, just as Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and others did, before joining the Trump campaign. But a hard core and a vast number of sympathizers will remain. Also consider the role of modern technology in our struggle, as well as bureaucratic organizations that favor and promote those with what Ian McGilchrist defines as a “Left Hemisphere” mentality. That view of reality is our enemy.
We have a long battle ahead of us on all fronts. Gloating about CNN’s and MSNBC’s falling ratings is enjoyable, but the political and social war is still not won. The new administration must deliver in the face of opposition not only from the far-left Democratic Party, but also opposition within the GOP.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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